Week One: Using Computers

In today’s introductory lecture, discussed, was the outline to UPCOOO4 Accessing Knowledge Unit, and what was to be expected in the upcoming 13 weeks. Lecturer Helen Cripps Unit Co-ordinater went through a power point presentation – covering important points such as; need-to-know dates, timeline, and hopeful outcomes to the completion of the course.

Today’s lecture was titled ‘Module One: Using Computers’. This module covered Basic Computing and what we’ll need to have access to, such as; a USB thumb drive, Active Email account and myECU profile.

Important points covered in the lecture were:
- What I can use a PC for.
- How to obtain IT skills.
- What these skills can be beneficiary for such as; Research, word processing, creating presntations and ways to communicate.

After the lecturer i moved on to my LAB, in which Helen Cripps had followed me to as my tutor. After introductory novelties, we got down to work. Our first workshop was to create a blog on www.blogger.com.

The means for creating this blog was to weekly write a post about that days lecture and tutorial, reinforcing the content.

Also to personalize our blogs, the option of uploading photos using two different websites, www.imageshack.com and www.photobucket.com. These sites help you convert a photo, video to get into a URL code so that it can be inserted into a blog like this. I have also after learning this used this in my personal my space and face book.

We also spent some of the time browsing the ECU Intranet. This helped my understanding of myECU, blackboard and student email which I've been told will inevitably be my means of communication over the next couple of years after i move onto my degree.


myECU - Blackboard


ECU Student email

To add the screen shots i used an internet site called: www.photobucket.com


Included in the workshop were two reading the first one is:

PC Lube and Tune

This article’s based around the services of PC Lube and tune, services varying from the gas station to the education on technical subjects to a variety of PC users.
This particular article explains different aspect of a PC, and how to use them. The Graphic User interface, designed by Macintosh was the most interesting paragraph i red from the article. The issue of Microsoft intellectually copying the ideas, was mentioned earlier in the lecture, by Helen Cripps who personally uses an apple notebook.

The second piece of writing in an article from a website titled:

How stuff works

This article is posted on; http://www.howstuffworks.com/pc.htm, This article covers, and introduction to PCs, hows to use them and where their heading in the future. It defines certain aspects of a PC; Motherboard, Hard disk, Operating system and many more...

Today was the first week of this unit for the semster, and after leaving i had a greater understanding of the basic uses with a PC and what is expectand for the next few weeks. As i am computer illiterate this could be interesting...

Signing Out for the first time,
Tegan Lamb